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ESENARIKAN

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WOODSTOCK FESTIVAL - 1969

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Historical Importance of the Woodstock Fes-tival of 1969:

The Woodstock Festival was a three-day concert (which rolled into a fourth day) that involved lots of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll - plus a lot of mud. The Woodstock Music Festival of 1969 has become an icon of the 1960s hippie counter-

culture.

Dates: August 15-18, 1969

Location: Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in the town of Bethel (outside of White Lake, New York)

Also Known As: Woodstock Music Festival; An Aquarian Exposition: Three Days of Peace and

Music

Overview of the Woodstock Festival of 1969:

The Organizers of Woodstock

The organizers of the Woodstock Festival were four young men: John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld, and Mike Lang. The oldest of the four was only 27 years old at the time of the Woodstock Festival.

Roberts, an heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, and his friend Rosenman were looking for a way to use Roberts’ money to invest in an idea that would make them even more mon-ey. After placing an ad in The New York Times that stated: “Young men with unlimited capital looking for interesting, legitimate investment opportunities and business proposi-tions,” they met Kornfeld and Lang.

The Plan for the Woodstock Festival

Kornfeld and Lang’s original proposal was to build a re-cording studio and a retreat for rock musicians up in Wood-stock, New York (where Bob Dylan and other musicians al-ready lived). The idea morphed into creating a two-day rock concert for 50,000 people with the hope that the concert would raise enough money to pay for the studio.

The four young men then got to work on organizing a large music festival. They found a location for the event up in an industrial park in nearby Wallkill, New York.

They printed tickets ($7 for one day, $13 for two days, and $18 for three days), which could be purchased in select stores or via mail order. The men also worked on organizing food,

signing musicians, and hiring security.

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Things Go Very Wrong

The first of many things to go wrong with the Woodstock Festival was the location. No matter how the young men and their lawyers spun it, the citizens of Wallkill did not want a bunch of drugged-out hip-pies descending on their town. After much wrangling, the town of Wallkill passed a law on July 2, 1969 that effectively banned

the concert from their vicinity.

Everyone involved with the Woodstock Fes-tival panicked. Stores refused to sell any more tickets and the negotiations with the musicians got shaky. Only a month-and-a half before the Woodstock Festival was to

begin, a new location had to be found.

Luckily, in mid-July, before too many peo-ple began demanding refunds for their pre-purchased tickets, Max Yasgur offered up his 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, New York to be the location for the Woodstock

Festival.

As lucky as they were to have found a new lo-cation, the last minute change of venue serious-ly set back the Festival timeline. New contracts to rent the dairy farm and surrounding areas had to be drawn up and permits to allow the Woodstock Festival in the town had to be ac-quired. Construction of the stage, a performers’ pavilion, parking lots, concession stands, and a children’s playground all got a late start and barely got finished in time for the event. Some things, like ticket booths and gates, did not get

finished in time.

As the date got closer, more problems sprung up. It soon appeared that their 50,000 people estimate was way too low and the new esti-mate jumped to upwards of 200,000 people. The young men then tried to bring in more toilets, more water, and more food. However, the food concessionaires kept threatening to cancel at the last minute (the organizers had accidental-ly hired people who had no experience in con-cessions) so they had to worry about whether or not they could airlift in rice as a backup food supply. Also troublesome was the last minute ban on off-duty police officers from working at

the Woodstock Festival.

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Hundreds of Thousands Arrive at the Woodstock Festival

On Wednesday, August 13 (two days before the Festi-val was to begin), there were already approximately 50,000 people camping near the stage. These early arrivals had walked right through the huge gaps in the fence where the gates had not yet been placed. Since there was no way to get the 50,000 people to leave the area in order to pay for tickets and there was no time to erect the numerous gates to prevent even more people from just walking in, the organiz-

ers were forced to make the event a free concert.

This declaration of a free concert had two dire ef-fects. The first of which was that the organizers were going to lose massive amounts of money by put-ting on this event. The second effect was that as news spread that it was now a free concert, an estimated one million people headed to Bethel, New York. Po-lice had to turn away thousands of cars. It is esti-mated that about 500,000 people actually made it

to the Woodstock Festival.

No one had planned for half a million people. The highways in the area literally became parking lots as people abandoned their cars in the middle of the street and just walked the final distance to the Woodstock Festival. Traffic was so bad that the organizers had to hire helicopters to shuttle the per-

formers from their hotels to the stage.

The Music Starts

Despite all the organizers’ troubles, the Wood-stock Festival got started nearly on time. On Fri-day evening, August 15, Richie Havens got up on stage and officially started the Festival. Sweet-water, Joan Baez, and other folk artists also

played Friday night.

The music started up again shortly after noon on Saturday with Quill and continued non-stop un-til Sunday morning around 9 am. The day of psy-chedelic bands continued with such musicians as Santana, Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead, and The

Who, to name just a few.

It was obvious to everyone that on Sunday, the Woodstock Festival was winding down. Most of the crowd left throughout the day, leaving about 150,000 people on Sunday night. When Jimi Hen-drix, the last musician to play at Woodstock, finished his set early on Monday morning, the

crowd was down to only 25,000.

Despite the 30-minute lines for water and at least hour-long wait to use a toilet, the Wood-stock Festival was a huge success. There were a lot of drugs, a lot of sex and nudity, and a lot

of mud (created by the rain).

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After the Woodstock Festival

The organizers of Woodstock were dazed at the end of the Festival. They didn’t have time to focus on the fact that they had cre-ated the most popular music event in his-tory, for they first had to deal with their in-credible debt (over $1 million) and the 70 lawsuits that had been filed against them.

To their great relief, the film of the Wood-stock Festival turned into a hit movie and the profits from the movie covered a large chunk of the debt from the Festival. By the time that everything was paid off, they were

still $100,000 in debt.